The following 11 works provide the antidote to the
fantasy that there's a shortage of energy and that
deregulation controls the amount of price-gouging and
profiteering utility corporations can extort from the
public. The crux here is not about supply but who
controls the supply and the money that pays for
it. Electricity can only be provided as a service,
not as a speculative commodity. "The solution is to
take over the private utility industry, make them
directly responsible to the public that owns them, and
switch them over to wind, solar and increased efficiency."

"This is Personal
Power Cart," says Ziegler, wheeling out a shiny black
box resembling a miniature moon buggy, replete with impellor from a
wind-generator and solar panels, sitting innocuously in the corner of his
Fairfax office. "One day very soon, everyone is going to own some sort
of energy storage device like this, and we are going to create our own
energy grid much like the World Wide Web. Then watch and see what
happens when politicians or corporations don't have their hands on the
switch." . . . At night the system plugs into the regular electrical
grid. This is where the story gets really interesting.
If
you charge up the power cart from the sun and wind during the day and
plug back into the grid at night, you can generator power when it is
needed and then sell "back to the grid" when there is a demand. In
other words buy low, sell high. One square meter of solar panel
generates about 125 watts at any given time. . . . At
25 cents per kilowatt hour and 800 Kilowatt hours produced per year, the
PPC will save you about $200 per year with 3 120-watt panels. Big
savings, however, are in overnight purchase and storage. Utilizing a
"time of use meter" ($277), if you buy power at off-hours from PG&E at 8
cents per KW hour and sell back to the grid at the peak hours (noon to
6PM) for 35 cents per KW-hr, the system will quickly pay for itself.
Also, as a renewable
energy device you can deduct $1,500 a year (20 percent of the value of
the system per year) from your taxes. The $5,000 purchase price (plus
about $2,500 for more photovoltaic panels) will pay for itself in
about 4 years. It must be said that there are much larger systems
than the PPC.

California's deregulatory meltdown will likely cost its ratepayers some $60
billion, for which they will get virtually nothing in return. . . . The
economic and ecological shock waves of this tragedy will reverberate
for decades. But for pure psychotic fantasy, none can exceed its use as a
pretext to build more nuclear power plants. . . .
In the late 1970s
the safe energy movement again pushed for massive
investments in renewable and efficient energy sources. This time the Reagan
administration sent a booming wind and solar industry packing to Denmark,
Germany, Japan and Israel.
At
2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, wind is now the cheapest and
fastest-to-build form of new electric power generation, with capacity
growing worldwide at 25 percent every year. In 2000, Germany alone
installed some 1,300 megawatts, more than what's generated by any single
U.S. nuke.
Between
the Rockies and the Mississippi, as well as offshore and in
hundreds of Eastern locations, the U.S. has more than enough wind potential
to generate its entire electrical supply more cheaply and more quickly than
any other source. Photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight directly to
electricity, are more expensive, but with a large-scale industrial
infrastructure, they offer the secure promise of clean energy independence.
Increased efficiency -- we still waste half of what we burn -- can save
energy far more cheaply than we can generate it with any new source. Not to
mention that the time required for a new nuke to come online -- five to 10
years, assuming a site can be selected tomorrow with no public opposition
-- would hardly ease the current power "crisis."
But
in the face of all that, the hugely financed nuclear power industry
persists.
Strangely,
much of the nuclear hype has been on a new technology called
"pebble bed reactors." The rhetoric is familiar: inherently safe, too cheap
to meter, no environmental impact. But no such operating reactors exist
today. There was one pebble bed prototype in Germany. It's now shut.
Another may be built in South Africa, but that will take five years.
Meanwhile,
some 500 less exotic "light water" reactors have been built
worldwide since the 1950s. By downplaying the technology on which it's
relied for a half-century in favor of an untested new design, what is the
industry trying to tell us? . . .
Yet
even without factoring in unknown future costs for radioactive waste
management, health impacts and the inevitable meltdowns, increased
efficiency and conservation are cheaper. So is wind power. And
photovoltaics will join them long before the first "new generation" reactor
can come on line, no matter which breed of this failed technology gets the
nod.
A
combination of these renewables and efficiencies would allow communities
and individual homes and businesses to control their own power supply,
independent of the oil, gas and utility companies. Which is the real reason
for this nuclear diversion -- just as it was 50 years ago.

Energy efficiency and renewable energy could immediately
begin to stem the energy crunch. For example:

If the 11.5 million households in California replaced 4 (average
100 watt) incandescent light bulbs with 4 (equivalent 27 watt)
compact fluorescent light bulbs, burning on average 5 hours per
day, we would save enough energy to shut down four 350
Megawatt power plants.

The California Energy Commission is providing low-interest
loans to convert traffic lights to more energy efficient modules
that cut electricity use by 80 to 90 percent. The change is
expected to save Sacramento County $67,000 a year in electricity
costs.

A bill currently under consideration in California would
increase funding for energy efficiency by more than $1 billion.

The current cost for wind projects with up-to-date technology
is 4 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) at good sites. Electricity
from large new wind farms in the western United States will cost
less than 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

By comparison, recent hikes in natural gas prices have driven
fuel costs alone for older gas-fired power plants past 5 cents per
kWh produced, and spot market shortages have led to much
higher prices -- $10 per kWh and up.

Leading states have made commitments that will increase the
total use of wind, solar, geothermal and biomass power by 8,550
megawatts. That's enough electricity to power 5.6 million homes,
reducing as much carbon dioxide - the main greenhouse gas
causing global warming - as planting 1.2 billion trees or taking
four million cars off the road.

Sales of residential wind turbines in California are already
skyrocketing as consumers seek refuge from high energy bills.
Sales for one company are seven times greater for the month of
January 2001 than they were for all of 2000.

. . . To keep it simple, we'll start with the top 10 truths about this unnatural
disaster:

There is no electric supply shortage threatening California (or the
nation), only a series of complex, cynical manipulations that have ramped
prices sky high, yielding enormous profits for a few distributors and
generators.

The deregulation bill at the root of this crisis was drafted by the
California utilities now facing bankruptcy and was rammed through the
California legislature (unanimously, in 1996) by the utilities' own
lobbyists.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, through its chief energy
spokesperson Ralph Cavanagh, and with support from the Energy Foundation,
played a key role in drafting, passing and then defending that bill.

But the California bill's catastrophic outcome was accurately predicted in
intricate detail by a wide range of grassroots, consumer and environmental
groups that challenged the deregulatory scheme in a 1998 statewide
referendum.

The utilities now screaming for help spent at least $40 million to defeat
the referendum that would have saved the state and nation from the current
crisis.

The utilities now screaming for help walked off with more than $20 billion
in "stranded cost" bailouts as part of deregulation, but nobody seems to be
able to account for where the money went, nor is there a concrete plan for
getting that money back.

The consuming public would gain, not lose, if the utilities now
threatening to go bankrupt actually did go bankrupt, and the public then took
over the utilities.

The public-owned utilities that supply Los Angeles and Sacramento are
prospering in the midst of this crisis, proving once again that public power
is the answer to the nation's long-term energy needs.

Those municipal utilities are deeply invested in energy efficiency and
renewable sources (wind and solar), which has provided them with a stable
supply in the midst of the crisis.

Any new electricity production added to the state and national grid
should come from wind, which is the cheapest and fastest-to-build new power
source, and from solar power, which can be installed on rooftops and at
industrial sites, freeing homeowners and businesses from the lethal
fluctuation of monopoly manipulations. . . .
The [power generators are] also using the "power shortage"
as an excuse to demand construction of more fossil fuel and nuclear
generators, burning natural gas, oil and coal and trying to revive
the atomic energy industry, all to the detriment of the public and
the environment, but all certain to generate gigantic profits for
the very people causing the crisis.
Here, instead, is what should happen:

The public should take direct ownership of the utilities, which have clearlyfailed. The system should be controlled on a municipal basis, as in
Sacramento and Los Angeles and, hopefully, soon in San Francisco and other
cities, towns and counties across the state and nation.

No new fossil fuel or nuke plants should be built. All new construction
money should go to building windmills, solar panels and increasing
efficiency. Wind is the cheapest and fastest to build form of new generating
capacity in the world today. Solar photovoltaic panels should be generating
electricity atop virtually every rooftop in the nation, starting with all new
construction. All water should also be heated by the sun, again starting with
new construction.

All this work should be done with union labor, starting with the
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which has been training its
labor force for just such a conversion.

The California crisis is not one of supply -- it's one of manipulation by an
obsolete private utility industry and a fleet of cynical power generators.
The solution is not to feed them still more warehouses full of money. The
solution is to take them over, make them directly responsible to the public
that owns them, and switch them over to wind, solar and increased
efficiency.

[T]he electricity crisis in California has been a contrived,
corporate-driven epic that has socked ratepayers and taxpayers with a
staggering double-whammy, destabilizing a huge energy delivery system that
had functioned reliably for nearly a century.
The
disaster's primary driving force was a botched 1996 deregulatory scheme
that forced ratepayers to hand more than $20 billion in "stranded cost"
bailouts to the very utilities now crying uncle. Those companies have still
not fully accounted for what happened to that money. . . .
[California
Governor Gray] Davis himself has been compromised by large
campaign donations
he has taken from SoCalEd and the other in-state utilities. He has helped
spread the widely held myth that California simply doesn't have access to
adequate power. In fact, it has more than 45,000 megawatts, while peak
demand during the blackouts this winter hovered below 30,000, according to
the state. In part because SoCalEd fought so successfully against building
new power plants inside the state, the stability of the grid now rests on
little more than private companies' willingness to sell on the daily spot
market. The blackouts, consumer advocates contend, merely show that
unregulated companies find it more lucrative to sell less power at a higher
price than to sell more power at a lower price.
Moreover,
the activists -- and a growing segment of the public -- now suspect
the utilities of exaggerating their losses by as much as $6 billion, through
an elaborate shell game: one branch of the company profits lavishly from high
prices for energy that it sells to the other branch, while that second branch
clamors for a government bailout. Since 1997, for example, the PG&E utility
has shifted at least $4.69 billion to its parent corporation. While the
utility was hiring bankruptcy lawyers last summer, its top executives were
dumping shares of the parent corporation's stock. . .
The
proposal to lift environmental restrictions to promote the drilling and
burning of natural gas will also create a host of problems. "It's not about
supply," says Fenn. "There's plenty of capacity around. It's a problem of
who controls the supply, and the money that pays for it."
Indeed,
says Fenn, the state's electricity demand has peaked at 33,000 mgw,
but there is 40,000 mgw of in-state capacity. "As in the oil crisis of the
1970s, this shortage is political, not physical. It is being caused not by a
physical lack of energy supply, but by politically-conceived market
structures written into AB1890 that prevent non-utility-controlled power from
reaching consumers, much as the local telephone monopolies have prevented
competition in spite of the law for years.
"That's
why local control of electricity supply is critical to real
solutions. And why the idea of gutting environmental laws under the auspices
of energy relief is such a horribly impotent gesture."
Equally
futile, say the critics, is bailing out the utilities that created
this mess, and whose parent corporations are profiting from it as never
before. "We're so afraid to let these companies go bankrupt," complains
Fenn. "But when all is said and done, the public would be better off letting
them go bankrupt and using eminent domain to buy their assets. At least then
we'll have gotten something tangible out of the deal.
A
trip to bankruptcy court, some argue, might also force the utilities to
account for where all that stranded cost and other bailout money has gone. . . .
Most
advocates see municipal ownership as inseparable from a strong push away
from fossil and nuclear fuels, which can be too easily manipulated, and
toward renewables, most immediately wind. Since natural gas prices have
skyrocketed, industrial-sized windmills have become the cheapest and
quickest-to-build source of new generation. By December, a massive
450-megawatt wind farm now under construction along the Oregon-Washington
border is expected to be pumping out juice at 3-5 cents/kwh, putting it at
the cutting edge.
Such
green developments, the advocates say, will remain marginal as long as
the grid is dominated by a few huge corporations heavily invested in
centralized technologies. Electricity is a service, not a commodity, says
Gene Coyle. "It can never be subjected to true competition. It needs to be
controlled by the public."
"Deregulation
of the electricity monopoly is a failure," adds Bee
Publisher McClatchy. "The monopoly should be returned to the tax-paying
consumers who support it and depend on it."
But
given the wall of "free market" media spin and the fossil-nuclear
orientation of the Bush regime, such lessons will not come easily into the
mainstream. The powerful fossil-nuclear interests close to the
administration are about to push a federal energy bill headed exactly in the
opposite direction, interpreting the California crisis from which they have
profited so hugely as a mandate for precisely the technologies that helped
create it.

Deregulation does not work because California did not deregulate enough

Deregulation will lower costs for consumers

Prices for electricity are being driven up because the demand for electricity is increasing

The problems are being caused because there is not enough power to supply California

California's environmental laws are preventing new power plants from being built in the state

Deregulation is good for the environment

California's energy crisis is best resolved through state, not federal, actions

California's three big utilities were forced, against their will, to sell their power plants

California's utilities are close to bankruptcy and need to be bailed out

Electricity deregulation is working in other states . . .

Electricity is an absolute necessity that should not be a speculated
product. Consumers have a right to affordable energy, produced in the
most environmentally sustainable fashion possible. But, when treated
as a speculative commodity, the cost and supply of electricity becomes
uncertain. This situation invites price-gouging and profiteering, as
we are witnessing today in California.
We
must critically analyze the intentionally perpetuated myths by the
proponents of deregulation, because it is clear that what many
pro-deregulation politicians are saying just is not true. We need to
carefully look at their assertions, or we will not only continue to
bailout utilities, we will higher prices, less reliability, and a
threatened environment. It is time to hold policymakers accountable
for the mess they have created, and roll back dangerous electric
utility deregulation schemes.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Proponents of deregulation have developed a repertoire of
excuses for why electricity deregulation is failing miserably. Rather than
admitting that a speculative market for a life-sustaining commodity such as
electricity does not work, they have cultivated such myths as, "California
just didn't deregulate enough."
In
fact, if the retail price for electricity was completely deregulated as
the industry suggests, the average consumer's electric bill would be $600,
rather than the approximately $55 charged before deregulation, according to
Public Citizen's calculations.
This
is just one of ten myths debunked by a Public Citizen
report released today. The
report examines in detail arguments that deregulation proponents are making
and explains why these contentions are false.

The three main arguments against nuclear electricity are
even stronger now than they were 30 years ago, when CNR
began putting them forth. This very short summary, with some
updated resources, will be handy during the new effort to revive
nuke-power. . . .
The
hydrogen economy, with the hydrogen provided by
various types of solar technologies, can liberate the planet both
from production of more radioactive poisons by nuke-plants and
from the greenhouse gases and other pollutants produced by
fossil fuels. The USA could commit itself to the hydrogen
economy now, for the sake of health, the environment, national
security, and abolition of wars over oil. The fuel of responsible
civilizations will be renewable solar-generated hydrogen gas.
. . . Claims, that "advanced" nuke-plants are inherently safe, merit no
credence until their proponents show that they believe their own
claims. If they do, they would openly beg Congress to
exempt every "advanced" nuke-plant from the law (the
Price-Anderson Act) which protects the nuke industry from full
liability for catastrophic radioactive releases.
In
any case, sudden catastrophic releases are a threat
limited to a few decades of operation. The real problem
endures for over 1,000 years. About 400 nuke-plants now
operate worldwide (100 in the USA). Permission to operate a
few additional nuke-plants might appear like a minor issue. But
if ten new nuke-plants each operate for at least 30 years, they
would commit posterity to isolating (containing) additional
radioactive poisons equivalent to the long-lived poisons
produced by exploding 300,000 Hiroshima-bombs: 1,000
bombs/year per plant * 10 plants * 30 years. The poison
generated by just ten plants would be about 20 times more than
all the long-lived radioactive fallout from all the atmospheric
nuclear bomb-tests conducted by the US, UK, and USSR
combined . . .
Each
additional nuke-plant of any design inevitably
increases the legacy of radioactive poison --- to threaten
posterity for at least 40 generations. This fact was and remains
enough to make nuke-plants unacceptable --- the ultimate
selfishness. Ethics aside, it is clear that nuke-plants were not
necessary in the past, and will not be necessary in the future.
Case closed.

Some parts of California are not suffering from power problems of any
kind. In Los Angeles and Sacramento, the lights are still on and the rates
have not doubled or tripled. As it happens, the people of Los Angeles and
Sacramento own their own power plants. This glaringly obvious fact has for
some reason escaped media attention, except in California. . . .
In
the current issue of Business Week, the cover story is on Exxon
Mobil's plan to take advantage of the "energy crisis." This would normally
be funny, given that Exxon is in the oil business and (as most people
outside the Oval Office are aware), the oil business has nothing to do with
electricity. However, Exxon's acquisition of Mobil, which is rich in natural
gas, unleashes a corporate behemoth of unprecedented size. Exxon also has a
corporate culture that would give nightmares to "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap of
business fame.
Here
are some interesting facts from the
Rocky Mountain Institute: The
cheapest source
of new electricity is efficiency; the next cheapest is
burning soft coal, which is a gross polluter; and the next cheapest after
that is wind power -- 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour.